Jul 30, 2009

I am having my longish summer vacation and having a good time (even started worrying that it is going to end). I have been using this music service called Spotify during my holiday so far and it has been serving me well. I like to share it with the readers of this blog so I will be giving away a Spotify invitation. Please tweet me if you are interested but before you do be absolutely sure that Spotify is available on your location.

Jul 21, 2009

I have seen several references to this test that Nokia uses to identify the progress of Scrum practices on her development teams. The test is genuine. In fact, when Nokia decided to use agile software development processes for all its software development on a bold move I was interviewed for a video that introduced Scrum to the Nokia organization.

S60 Java team, which I was part of, was already using Scrum at that time. Incidentally, I was the scrum master of the eSWT team. Having scrum master experience was a rarity in Nokia back then and several member’s of the team had taken the test at that time. After a few years later, scrum masters are no longer rare and I am glad to see that Nokia’s huge effort and experience started to become valuable for others outside Nokia.

Jul 10, 2009

In case you are wondering what happened to Nokia's contribution of the eSWT implementation using Qt here is an update. If you are hearing about such a contribution for the first time, you can read the details in this earlier post.

The legal check for the contribution has been completed and we are now clear to check the code into CVS. However, we have a slight delay now. All the developers of the Nokia's eSWT team that have commit rights are on vacation (as illustrated by footage). Our original plan was to complete the contribution before the summer holiday's started but the legal check took longer than we have expected. Nevertheless, the code will be available in late August, and will start spreading the eSWT love to new platforms.

Jul 1, 2009

Nokia Java Runtime 2.0 for S60 (JRT 2.0) has been released for beta testing and now available from Nokia beta labs site. This is a package that upgrades the Java runtime on the phone (tested with Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and N97) with this new one. This is the first time we are testing the independent release/upgrades of Java Runtime from S60 releases. In the future this will allow us to deliver the latest and greatest JRT to older phones.

Some of the new features and improvements that will be noticeable (also listed on release notes) are one-click application installation, application launch user experience, and execution performance. I must tell about a feature that I am proud of and can be interesting to the readers of this blog. The Java installer in JRT 2.0 (the application that installs midlets) is itself a Java application. In fact, the UI(prompts etc. ) for the installer is developed using eSWT. I am very excited about the new installer because it proves that eSWT can be used to create native looking UIs, even ones that are integrated to the system.